The upcoming posts will focus on making cities better by comparing the practical plans with the ideal visions of city infrastructure. I'll focus on the issues concerning Oakland (where I live) and the surrounding Bay Area. The goal is to simplify these complex topics around city infrastructure into sweet nothings suitable for pillow talk.

Along the way I'll ask the audience questions and publish the responses so everyone can know what each other are thinking. Here is an example.

Last year we planted two Haus Avocado trees in our back yard. Within 4 months they developed a scar with a white fungus on the side of the trunk and several places on the branches. I'm wondering if there is any way to treat this disease or if I should just remove the treas.

To the left are the notes I've recorded via a Seed.io Tag on one of the trees showing the recent progression of the disease. Even after cutting off the fungus, it grew back.

Please post if you have any suggestions. I'd love to grow some healthy avocado trees.

This Friday we hosted a story night themed, "End of Times". Gabe cooked an awesome meal of Lasagna, quinoa salad, and Cesar salad and anyone who wanted too, and some that didn't, told their prediction of how life on earth would come to an end.

There we're great stories about mass die offs from a disease, the slow degradation of community from the new type of isolated suburban family structure and even the hoarding of power in times square.

We then rallied to go dancing in Oakland and finished with Liar's dice. I used a Seed.io Tag to post these pictures to the right.

Here is my story, "BruBru's long shot".It all started here in North Oakland. A smattering hodge podge of people all looking to hear how the world will end. They feasted first, got drunk, then settled to listen to answers of the most important question ever in our solar system and maybe even all of theOrion–Cygnus Armof our galaxy. Each speaker held the attention of the audience like a grandpa telling a dirty joke at thanksgiving dinner. There was no judgement about the likelihood or truthfulness of the story. Only cheers.All around them shit was hitting the fan. People’s thirst for a higher standard of living was mistranslated into a feracious consumption of superficial shit that was making earth a toxic oven. There was no debate about if the world was becoming toxic, everyone agreed. It was purely a lower priority than peoples daily YOLO activities. In many places around the world, the local population grew and declined at rates identical to those seen in a pitri dish. Slow growth at first that growing exponentially until food became a constraint and then a massive die out with few survivors. In general people accepted eventual human extinction as a matter of fact.By the time all the stories had been told, the small group was drunk enough to do something stupid. And they did. And it was amplified by fact that the President, Congress and all supreme court judges had announced the dissolution of the constitution and all government activities because it had become too much work and they thought we should all just start over. Anarchy had begun.The group was so drunk they listen to BruBru, the charismatic guy that no one had invited. He was the only remaining optimist and one of the few that could still speak coherently. Using his incredibly effective wink-kiss move he quickly got everyone in the room to sign, in a blood fingerprint, to commit to his plan to escape earth. His proposal was to build a nuclear bomb powered space ship that could let us escape from earth. Even after people sobered up, the idea seemed better than wallowing undirected for the rest of their lives.In the next 2 years the group stole 600 atomic bombs from silos in the great plains and bought them with cocain from russian military officials. They even stole the retired space shuttle and retrofitted it hold all of the bombs.Everything was finally in place and the group loaded into the shuttle without giving the slightest hint to anyone else. They sat there in the cockpit, backs facing the ground, feet in the air, listening to BruBru congratulate the group on saving humanity because it was obvious that humans on earth only had a couple years before people just gave up living.The shuttle rockets propelled the craft safely out of the atmosphere and then the bombs were exploded behind the crafts shield to accelerate it faster than chemical combustion would allow. Bombs were exploded 10 minutes apart so after 10 hours they were out of bombs and traveling 50% of light speed. Plenty fast to get them to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri before their survival supplies ran out..... if they were headed in the right direction. If they were not there was no chance to survive as the next star in their path was a hundred thousand light years away.There was silence after the last bomb. No one spoke. The only activity was BruBru’s recruited astrophysicist, Moby, reading the ships new speed and direction. After a minute, the way too sober Moby, shook his head then looked down in his lap.

I am fascinated by the idea of a no maintenance machine food machine. I'm running an experiment to learn how sprout seeds on cloth that moves small amounts each day. This could be used to produce micro-greens for people or chickens.

One benefit of growing sprouts is that it requires very little light in the first 10 days and they are still extremely productive. .

Experiment Setup Burlap cloth is run in Tupperware filled with water and then on to a cookie pan sitting on a warming pad. Every day I'll move the sack 2 inches forward (toward the right side of the warming pan). Sprouts take ~5 days to sprout and 15 days to become micro-greens so in the 30 inches progression, each daily batch of seeds will become micro-greens.

Hypotheses Seeds will sprout but may be limited by not having nutrients.

Alternatives A different grow medium may work better because burlap is not very absorbant. Cotton or some specific microgreen cloth would work better.

Questions

Could the cloth be reused?

How could the cloth be cleaned so the roots don't cause mold on the next run. (chickens?)